<html><head><style type="text/css"><!-- DIV {margin:0px;} --></style></head><body><div style="font-family:verdana, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:12pt"><DIV>No, but eating an egg is different from dealing with all the members of a religion or all the people living in a large region, don't you think? Perhaps a better metaphor would be eating one egg, finding it bad and presuming all eggs now and forever are bad. (Side note: a chef once told me that, if you don't like a particular dish, you should never say you don't the certain food item -- eggs, aubergine, whatever -- that went into it, but that you don't like it prepared that way. Even so, I still find it hard to imagine certain foods would ever taste good no matter how they're prepared.:)</DIV>
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<DIV>And, unlike Sabrina, I've met and worked with many Muslims. Few of the ones I've met fit the scriptural or doctrinal determinist model. (Scriptural determinism is the view that one can know all about a member of a religion merely by looking at the scriptures of that religion. Doctrinal determinism is the same view applied to doctrines. Typically, such determinisms fail because religious people don't slavishly follow the scriptures (or a specific interpretation thereof) or doctrines of their respective religions. In fact, many other factors seem to impinge -- leaving out free will -- as much as or more than religious scripture or doctrine for most believers of any religion. This is exactly the sort of thing "fundamentalists" of any religion usually complain about too: most members of their religion are weak and water down the beliefs.*)</DIV>
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<DIV>Regards,</DIV>
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<DIV>Dan</DIV>
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<DIV>* Add to this, most members of any religion having more than a few hundred members tend to be born into the religion -- their parents raise them up in it or it's part of their cultural wallpaper. These people are unlikely to be the scriptural literalists or doctrinal purists that make headlines.</DIV>
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<DIV style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; FONT-FAMILY: times new roman, new york, times, serif"><FONT face=Tahoma size=2><B><SPAN style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold">From:</SPAN></B> John Clark <jonkc@bellsouth.net><BR><B><SPAN style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold">To:</SPAN></B> ExI chat list <extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org><BR><B><SPAN style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold">Sent:</SPAN></B> Wed, August 11, 2010 12:10:53 AM<BR><B><SPAN style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold">Subject:</SPAN></B> Re: [ExI] The mosque at Ground Zero<BR></FONT><BR>
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<DIV>On Aug 10, 2010, at 12:06 AM, Sabrina Ballard wrote:</DIV><BR class=Apple-interchange-newline>
<BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><SPAN class=Apple-style-span style="WORD-SPACING: 0px; FONT: medium Verdana; TEXT-TRANSFORM: none; TEXT-INDENT: 0px; WHITE-SPACE: normal; LETTER-SPACING: normal; BORDER-COLLAPSE: separate; orphans: 2; widows: 2">I don't know Islam or any Muslims well enough to make a judgement call<BR>as to the entire religion</SPAN></BLOCKQUOTE><BR></DIV>
<DIV>Do you have to eat the entire egg to know it is bad?</DIV>
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<DIV> John K Clark</DIV></DIV></DIV></div><br>
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